Cindy Mi

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Cindy Mi is the co-founder of a brick-and-mortar English language training institute called ABC English and left to form VIPKid. She is the founder and CEO of VIPKid.^[1]

Early life and education[]

Mi was born in the province of Hebei, China.^[2]

Mi grew up with a natural interest in education. As a child she was curious about the world outside of China, and would spend her lunch money on audio cassettes and magazines to teach herself English.^[3]

At age 14 Mi moved to Harbin in north-eastern China.^[4] She experienced a new learning environment and was severely behind the rest of her new class in math.^[5] With many students in one class, the teacher was not able to pay attention to each student and explain concepts in detail and Mi could not fully understand the answers for questions. Mi found this as the problem in which the lessons were not personalized for students and students may be easy to lose confidence in the learning process.

She continued to teach herself English, and by age 15 she began to tutor other students.^[6] By age 17, she dropped out of high school to co-found ABC English, a tutoring company, with her uncle.^[6] ABC English was a small company competing among large brick-and-mortar English language training institute. She did a little of everything to make the business run: sales, buying books, interviewing prospective teachers, teaching classes, grading homework. She worked early in the morning until 10 at night. When she finished the work from ABC English, she continued to work on her own studies until 2 a.m., eventually earning a bachelor's degree in English literature from Beijing Foreign Language University through China’s system of incredibly difficult self-taught exams.^[5]

Later she got her MBA from the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and attended Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management in the US as an exchange student as well.^[7][4]

VIPKid[]

VIPKid connects fluent English-speaking teachers with young students for one-on-one 25-minute virtual tutoring lessons.^[2] Mi has been successful in raising $500 million in financing.^[5]

Awards[]

• Mi has spoken at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Boao Forum for Asia's Annual Conference 2018, ASU+GSV Summit, OZY Fest, Y Combinator's Startup School at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Y Combinator's Global Founders Summit (both 2018 and 2017) in San Francisco, among many others.^[7]
• Mi was selected to join the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders Class of 2018^[8] and was a recipient of the ASU + GSV Summit 2019 Power of Women Award.^[9]
• The SCMP named her as one of the "2018 Who's Who of Women Leaders in China's Tech Industry"^[10] and Forbes Asia named her as one of the "2018 Forbes Emergent 25: The Women Making Their Mark in Asia's Enterprises."^[11]
• Mi has been recognized as one of Glassdoor's Top 100 CEOs in 2019.^[12]

References[]